


The Midnight Star

by gloriouswhisperstyphoon



Series: a truth that no one wants to hear [2]
Category: American Gods - Neil Gaiman, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: American Gods Fusion, F/M, Rebelcaptain if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 15:43:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15367878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloriouswhisperstyphoon/pseuds/gloriouswhisperstyphoon
Summary: Gods fade, and when they do, they do it unmourned and unremembered.Or: Jyn comes to America and learns the truth about what it means to be forgotten as a goddess.





	The Midnight Star

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melanoradrood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melanoradrood/gifts).



Jyn comes to America as an unwanted and already half-remembered goddess.

No.

That’s not quite right.

Jyn comes to America alongside her sisters in the mind of a pair of carpenter brothers, expert craftsmen that are fleeing the Tsarist courts, her legends already warped and twisted.

But arriving and _arriving_ are different concepts, especially when you’re a goddess, so she sleeps for most of the journey.

No.

That word isn’t quite right.

She’s standing there backstage, waiting in the wings, along with the other pantheons that came to America but never grew established as the brothers continue their journey on the ship. They all have a terrible, hungry, aching look on their face, desperate to grow roots in this weak soil.

Her sisters keep her well away from them, those famished demons and gods. Besides, she has problems enough of her own in the old country.

New Amsterdam is a bright place, but it’s still full of discarded pantheons - not _forgotten_ , truly, but their legends are so hazy and unclear that they may as well be woodsmoke and ashes.

“It’s not enough,” she says to Zorya Utrennyaya, the eternally young Morning Star, as they watch Fyodor, the older brother, start a carving of Jyn alongside her sisters, facing down an impossibly dark and deadly monster, a garbled inscription below their images. “These people don’t know how to worship right.”

For what she yearns for is not this sanitised glory of Bible stories that she now sees, but the life and the vigour of her ancient rites - the maidens dancing about in the woods, their hair flowing out behind them, the flashes of light on her crescent shaped sickle and the spurt of blood as it drip-drip-drips onto the dark loam.

Saw stands there with them, for he was brought along too by the brothers. But he’s even weaker than they are, since the brothers have no use for carving a god of evil and darkness - it’s Bielebog they carve, the brighter and lighter brother.

Zorya Verchernyaya, the Evening Star, whispers to her as they watch the brothers work on a carving one day - they can see the difference in them. Jyn stands in the middle of them, her face in stark relief and her sisters are merely doe-eyed maidens behind her.

“It’s not fair! Perhaps I can make my future better somewhere else with Zorya Utrenyaya. I’ve heard that Chicago could be a good place for us to settle.”

Jyn grabs at her sleeve. “You would leave me, sister? But we’re so weak here already! Why would you want to leave me and Saw?”

It’s half a sob when she replies. “Because I’m fading! What hope is there? They remember me as a maiden and not a goddess!”

“But there is power in that, sister. You can’t leave me!”

Zorya Utrennyaya is calm when she packs her things. “We can leave you sister, because we are so weak that we’re like to fade in a few months.”

Zorya Verchernyaya swoops down and places a gentle kiss on her forehead. “We’ll see each other again, sister. This I swear.”

They never see each other again.

The Pleiades are high in the sky when Saw and her eventually set out for Chicago, years later, when even their meagre worshippers have dried up and they are almost forgotten themselves.

They are forced to find work, along with the other crowds of the hungry and the destitute.

Saw finds his place in the abattoirs, swinging his huge hammer down on the heads of animals. He comes home every day to their tiny apartment smelling of blood and death and cigarette smoke and it makes Jyn want to retch.

It’s not the blood that makes her feel that way.

It’s the fact that there is no ritual, but only the mechanised slaughter of a production line.

Saw laughs at her when she says that to him, calling her a foolish child who yearns for a fairy world.

And she does - she aches for a world where a monster can be chained in the stars, where the sun rides out every morning in a golden chariot and returns to his home every evening and where three sisters guard the cosmos against a terrible creature.

Time passes, and then so does the money from the meatpacking plant.

Jyn, too, is forced to go find work eventually, going out onto the streets to find some way to provide for them.

She finds a job cleaning floors in an observatory by night.

The irony of it is not quite lost on her, but she can’t find it in her to think too much on it, not when winter is coming and they need food and warmth to survive.

The stars twinkle above her head as she sweeps the floors below, a constant reminder of who she is and who she was.

But she needs to survive and so she keeps her eyes on the ground while she yearns to be looking above at the whirling stars and the stardust that dances among them.

The winter goes on and on and the lean days become lean weeks, become lean months, become years and the good times become farther and farther apart.

And she lingers in this halfway point, standing backstage in the wings, waiting for something to happen and then one day -

The man is tossing and turning on the lumpy couch that she and Saw found on the sidewalk one day, murmuring in his sleep for someone, his face twisted into a mask of horror and fear.

She looks in his dreams a moment and almost falls over in sheer shock when she sees what is there.

_Bombs falling, bullets ricocheting, the brilliant flash of guns everywhere and the smell of poppy fields burning._

She draws herself back and stands by the window.

He’ll wake in his own time, and when he does, she’ll do her best to ease him on his terrible journey.

And so for now, she looks up at the stars, the brilliant light of the Heavenly Waters twinkling at where she stands down below.

**Author's Note:**

> For melanoradrood, my lovely friend who won't stop asking me for more American Gods feels.


End file.
